From ‘Troubled’ to ‘Killer,’ Despite Many Efforts

OMAHA, Dec. 7 — “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” A sign bearing these severe but hopeful words marks the entrance to Cooper Village, a residential treatment facility for teenagers along the rural northern edge of Omaha.

Robert A. Hawkins, as a ward of the State of Nebraska, received extensive care at Cooper — private psychotherapy, family therapy, drug counseling — from 2003 to 2005.

It was his longest stop in a five-year journey through a maze of juvenile-services programs that began when he was 13 and was charged with making homicidal threats toward his stepmother.

On Wednesday, just a few miles away, Mr. Hawkins, 19, took a semiautomatic assault rifle into the largest mall in the state and opened fire, killing eight people before turning the gun on himself. It was the deadliest attack in Nebraska since Charles Starkweather killed 10 people here in 1957-58.

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A store surveillance camera shows Robert A. Hawkins raising a rifle at the start of his rampage in an Omaha mall Wednesday.Credit
Omaha Police Department, via Reuters

“I’ve just snapped,” Mr. Hawkins wrote in one of two suicide notes the police released on Friday.

But his actions did not come without warning signs; nor were these signals ignored. The rampage appears to be not so much a case of a young man slipping through the cracks, as a tragedy in which measured vigilance ended up not being enough.

“We all cared about this child,” said Sandra K. Markley, a deputy county attorney who represented the state in a juvenile case involving Mr. Hawkins and played a role in determining his course of treatment. “I’ve been reviewing his file, and, of course, there is a lot of second-guessing. But there were no indications that he was harmful in this way.”

That is the point state officials have emphasized. Todd Landry, the director of children and family programs for the Department of Health and Human Services, said at a press conference Thursday that “all appropriate services were provided when needed and as long as needed.”

The state estimates it spent more than $265,000 on Mr. Hawkins’s care.

“He was in good facilities,” Ms. Markley said. “He had good supervision. It didn’t all go perfectly, of course. But we deal with a lot of troubled children, and, as far as we could tell, he was no more troubled than many of them.”

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Robert A. Hawkins, 19, killed eight people and himself within minutes on Wednesday.

But even with the intervention, said Denis McCarville, who runs Cooper Village, the state failed Mr. Hawkins.

“If this were a physical health issue — if he had leukemia — you would not say that as much as possible had been done,” Mr. McCarville said. “This was not pursued. As you can see, there continued to be issues.”

In a suicide note to his family, Mr. Hawkins described himself as “a constant disappointment,” apologized for “what I’ve put you through” and wrote that he did not want anyone to miss him.

“Just remember the good times we had together,” he wrote. “I love you mommy. I love you dad.” The note went on to express his love for several others, closing with “P.S. I’m really sorry.”

His was hardly an idyllic childhood. Mr. Hawkins’s parents divorced when he was 3. Officials said that from that point, he lived with his father, Ronald Hawkins, who was in the Air Force, and his mother had little involvement in his life. Both parents remarried and eventually divorced again. A juvenile petition filed in 2002 listed Mr. Hawkins’s father’s address but stated that his mother’s whereabouts were unknown.

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A makeshift memorial grew at the entrance to the Von Maur store at the Westroads Mall in Omaha.Credit
Joshua Lott for The New York Times

In May that year, after Mr. Hawkins threatened to kill his stepmother, he was admitted to the Piney Ridge Center in Waynesville, Mo. Court records show that by that September, he had been hospitalized twice for psychiatric problems, and doctors had diagnosed attention-deficit disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, a mood disorder and “parent/child relational problems.”

When his military health insurance ran out, the elder Mr. Hawkins applied for his son to become a ward of the state. The boy moved in and out of foster care, in and out of school — last year, he eventually dropped out of high school — and through residential facilities, including Cooper Village.

“The circumstances of being out of his home from the age of 13 until whenever — that was obviously hard on him,” Ms. Markley said. “But we felt that he had to be removed from his home for the sake of his stepmother’s safety. His father was dealing with a very difficult child.”

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She added: “But his father tried very hard. He participated in the family therapy sessions.”

In 2003, while in foster care, Mr. Hawkins was charged with third-degree assault after a fight at Papillion-LaVista High School. In March 2005, he was charged with possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. Later that year, he was ordered to complete a chemical dependency program that included attending one Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meeting a week.

“At the end, marijuana was one of the big issues for him,” Ms. Markley said.

Dennis Marks, the Sarpy County public defender who once represented Mr. Hawkins, said Mr. Hawkins had been “making progress” through his treatment.

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The police released two notes Friday written by Robert A. Hawkins, this one to his family and another to his friends.Credit
Omaha Police Department, via Associated Press

“There were a lot of services provided,” Mr. Marks said. “But it’s up to the individual after that.” He cited one of Mr. Hawkins’s caseworkers, Angie Pick, as “excellent.”

But by August 2006, the state had terminated its custody of Mr. Hawkins, saying “the child is nonamenable to further services.” Officials said he had refused to participate in drug treatment. Although he was 18 by then, the age of majority in Nebraska is 19, and the termination, officials said, was based more on exasperation than evidence that Mr. Hawkins was rehabilitated.

Mr. McCarville, the director of Cooper Village, said that decision was regrettable. “The state could have ordered him to continue treatment,” he said. “Instead, the state made the decision to terminate. Even for a youth that received over $265,000 worth of treatment, you can’t say, ‘Well that’s enough.’”

For many of those who had tried to help Mr. Hawkins, it was jarring on Friday to see three photographs of him taken from a store surveillance video. The pictures show that he walked in, left and returned six minutes later, ready to kill, said Officer Bill Dropinski, a spokesman for the Omaha Police Department, which released the images.

In the first photograph, Mr. Hawkins appears to be unarmed as he enters the Von Maur department store in a black sweatshirt and sneakers. In the second picture, he again enters the store, this time apparently with a weapon tucked under his right arm. In the third photo, he is outside the store’s third-floor elevator with the rifle raised, taking aim.

Investigators are studying the rest of the surveillance tape.

“We want to get some idea of how to stop this, if it were to unfortunately ever happen again,” Officer Dropinski said. “Was there anyone who could have possibly stopped him?”

Correction: December 10, 2007

A front-page article in some editions on Friday about efforts by the State of Nebraska to help Robert A. Hawkins, who shot and killed eight people at an Omaha mall before turning the gun on himself, misspelled the given name of a man who runs a residential treatment facility where Mr. Hawkins received care. He is Denis McCarville, not Dennis.

Susan Saulny contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: From ‘Troubled’ to ‘Killer,’ Despite Many Efforts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe